Four decades after his star turn as an alcoholic alien in the film “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” David Bowie is now co-writing a new stage work based on the same story.

Off Broadway’s New York Theater Workshop said on Thursday that Mr. Bowie would collaborate with Enda Walsh, the Irish playwright who won a Tony Award for “Once,” in writing the new piece, entitled “Lazarus.” The play will feature new songs by Mr. Bowie, as well as new arrangements of older songs, and will focus on the story of Thomas Newton, the alien-turned-inventor portrayed by Mr. Bowie in the 1976 film.

Mr. Bowie won’t be on stage, nor will this be his first theatrical venture — in the early 1980s, he spent three months playing the title role in “The Elephant Man” on Broadway.

“Lazarus” will be directed by Ivo van Hove, an avant-garde Belgian director who has a long relationship with New York Theater Workshop and used Mr. Bowie’s music in a Dutch-language production of “Angels in America” that ran last year at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

James C. Nicola, the artistic director of New York Theater Workshop, said he was not sure how to describe the project — whether even to call it a musical — and said it been in secret development for some years.

He said Mr. Bowie, who declined to comment, had been seeking to do a theatrical work inspired by Walter Tevis’s 1963 novel “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” and brought the idea to Mr. van Hove, who in turn brought the project to Mr. Walsh and to the New York theater.

“It’s going to be a play with characters and songs — I’m calling it music theater, but I don’t really know what it’s going to be like, I just have incredible trust in their creative vision,” Mr. Nicola said. “I’m really excited about it. These are three very different sensibilities to be colliding.”

Mr. Nicola said that the show, which is scheduled to open late this year, would not retell the story of the book and film, but would feature some of the same characters.

_________________And I want to believe in the madness that calls 'Now'

Mr. Bowie, who declined to comment for this article, conceived the show as a sort of sequel to “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” the 1963 Walter Tevis novel that inspired the 1976 Nicolas Roeg film, in which Mr. Bowie starred as Thomas Newton, a louche, orange-haired extraterrestrial. Here, Newton will be played by Michael C. Hall, late of “Dexter” and “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.”

Apparently Mr. Bowie had long contemplated writing music for the theater, a path previously trod by other rock and pop idols including David Byrne, Elton John and Cyndi Lauper. Last spring, the English producer Robert Fox contacted Mr. Walsh, who had written the book for “Once,” which ended up on Broadway and won a mantel full of Tonys, and informed him that Mr. Bowie was interested in revisiting the character of Thomas Newton, though not as an actor this time.

A young girl and a chorus of angels (or were they prostitutes, or angel prostitutes?) sang “This Is Not America,” a song Mr. Bowie and the Pat Metheny Group recorded for the soundtrack for “The Falcon and the Snowman.” Mr. Hall, with half-closed eyes and a Bowie-esque sneer, sang what seemed to be a new song, a ballad that began “Look up here, I’m in heaven.” Then he attempted autoerotic asphyxiation with a blue negligee.

_________________And I want to believe in the madness that calls 'Now'